Do you cook with LARD?
Back in the early 90s and certainly earlier, lard was the go-to cooking fat for every household, especially in Europe and Northern America. It was praised for its tasty meals, fried chicken, the tantalizing flavour it added to meals and many other positives.
It was also easy to get in its purest form, so there wasn’t much to worry about. As the years progressed and industrial processing became a thing, hydrogenated fats became a thing. In fact, they all but kicked lard into oblivion.
Have you tried cooking with lard?
But things have changed of recent. People are turning back to lard and ditching processed fats, having witnessed their wide range of negative side effects. Health experts have already waived the centuries old belief that lard is directly responsible for increased heart disease and advised people to use it for their meals.
Research done on over 300,000 people and published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition also found no direct relationship between lard consumption and increased heart disease. In other words, there’s nothing to worry about if you consume it reasonably.
Are you still debating on whether to use lard in your meals? Here are some of the benefits of cooking with lard that will spark your interest. Lard ranks quite high in the monounsaturated fat department, sporting 48% monounsaturated fat, which is only a place lower than olive oil.
Monounsaturated is known for being heart healthy, which makes lard the ideal fat to use for your cooking if you want to keep healthy without extra effort. Lard’s monounsaturated fat content also makes it effective at lowering the disease-causing bad cholesterol (LDL) and increasing good cholesterol (HDL).Lard has high amounts of Vitamin D for your body to make use of, with 1 tbsp containing up to 1000IU of vitamin (many times higher than what you can get from plants or vitamin D supplements).
This makes it a necessary addition to your diet, especially if you don’t access as much sunlight as required. You need Vitamin D for everything from hormonal regulation to bone strengthening to treating colds, and lard gives it to you for free. It makes the best food ever. You’ve probably heard of how fried chicken is no good if it isn’t fried with lard. Chicken is one of the many dishes lard has been used for across centuries, and the results only keep getting better. Lard also comes with a fine natural smell that flavours up every recipe wholesomely.
It’s a safer, cheaper alternative to hydrogenated, industry made fats such as Crisco. Cottonseed oil (Crisco) and other oils are often hydrogenated to elongate their shelf life, which makes them dangerous for health. Most processed oils also contain the all-too dangerous trans-fats that are associated with weight gain, heart disease and more. Lard, in its natural form and in proper quantities, has none of these negative side effects.
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